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over 40, telling storiesTue, 24 Jul 2018 19:50:56 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8The Case of the Bad Pantieshttp://tuenight.com/2018/07/the-case-of-the-bad-panties/
http://tuenight.com/2018/07/the-case-of-the-bad-panties/#respondTue, 17 Jul 2018 18:29:49 +0000http://tuenight.com/?p=22453In 1992, I was 23 and the girl who had sex on the first date, if not before.Not coincidentally, I was also drinking too much and dating a lot of low-wattage losers. After a few drinks, I found myself far more interested in what my date was like with his clothes off. To get him to shut up, my underpants came down. But this strategy was getting me nowhere. I was beginning to suspect that it might be better to date people who didn’t bore me into having sex. It was around this time I was asked out by someone I actually liked, a person in whom I potentially could invest time and energy. He was a gentle, shy creature, the type who might be scared off by my willingness to — well, by my willingness. How to keep myself from jumping him pre-appetizer?

The beauty of my solution lay in its simplicity: I would wear a pair of panties too embarrassing to reveal to him.

The panties in question were a pair of threadbare, beige-gray Hanes Her Way, with an elastic waistband that appeared to have been shredded by raccoons. They were at least a decade old. I don’t recall ever purchasing a pair of underwear that rose above my navel, which leads me to conclude, reluctantly, that I was wearing my mother’s underpants. I can’t imagine how this scenario came to pass, but there it is. My mom’s panties were serving as a chastity belt. She might appreciate the symbolism, if she weren’t praying so hard right now.

I’ve told this story to friends who can’t understand the notion of owning bad underwear. These friends traipse around with wry smiles on their faces, luxuriating in the knowledge that the garment separating their crotches from the public is a pair of silky hand-sewn pink-and-black lace-lined boyshorts. Well, bully for them. As for me, I have long had a collection of good underwear, with some bad ones loitering around like ugly, demented cousins. I wear the good kind when going to a place where I’d prefer to feel like a civilized being and not a subhumanoid in a skirt. The good underwear is not so much for showing off, but for feeling presentable. It’s for knowing that if you were to fall from a hot-air balloon, the spectators below would appreciate your sexy satin knickers. Good underwear hoists and flatters. You don’t have to worry about your good underwear bagging above the waistline of your jeans or dipping below the hem of your shorts. Good underwear obeys.

[pullquote]I have long had a collection of good underwear, with some bad ones loitering around like ugly, demented cousins.[/pullquote]

Bad underwear is different. No longer comfortable or attractive, bad underwear is worn on laundry days, or when you have the worst period in menstrual history and do not want to destroy a good pair. You only wear the bad underwear when you are staying inside. It doesn’t matter how much clothing you plan to wear over it; the bad underwear stays at home. No one may see the bad underwear, ever.

This rule is what compelled me to wear my ugliest underwear on the night in question. I had traveled from Brooklyn to Boston to have dinner with Bill, a man I met at a wedding in Maine some weeks before. (I had already dated most of the men in New York, so I had to branch out to the Northeast Corridor.) We had spent hours sitting by a lake, our legs dangling off the dock, sharing a bottle of Champagne while the rest of the wedding danced and whooped it up inside. When I try to remember Bill, mostly what I recall is that he was extremely tall, which might explain why I can’t remember his face. What I do remember is that he was nice — nice in a way that most men I had dated were not. He seemed interested in what I had to say. Instead of responding to my jokes with another joke, he laughed. And when he did talk about himself, he did so with charming vulnerability.

“Long-distance relationships,” he explained. “They never work. After this last one I swore I would never get into another relationship with someone who didn’t live in my city.”

I murmured sympathetically, but something told me I was being issued a challenge. I’ll never get into a long-distance relationship, he was saying, UNLESS. Unless it’s with the perfect woman. I felt duty-bound to take this on. I was going to be the out-of-state girlfriend who proved the exception to the rule. I was going to show him that miles mean nothing when love is everything. Distance be damned, I was going to make him love me, this man whose face I can no longer recall.

Thus, the visit. I was staying at a friend’s place so that I wouldn’t be tempted to sleep with him immediately. I had to build this up slowly, because that was how our long-distance love affair would sustain itself — the excruciating longing for each other would help the time between get-togethers fly by. This was my guess, anyway. I had no clue how long-distance relationships worked, having never actually been in one.

“Long-distance relationships are doomed from the outset,” he said during dinner. I coyly responded by batting my eyelashes in Morse code: I. Know. What You’re Really. Trying. To Tell Me. Wink. Wink.

But there was beer, and soon I was forgetting all my rules. All I could remember was no sex, which I reinterpreted to mean, but fooling around is okay. He suggested we watch a movie at his place, which seemed like a completely reasonable idea. Soon we were sandwiched on his lumpy couch, mashing our faces into each other.

“Alice,” he said as he pulled away, “I just . . . I don’t think I’m ready for this.”

In response, I put my tongue in his ear. He shut up about his misgivings. But strangely, I felt some reluctance of my own. Why was I hesitating? Then I felt them drooping around my hips: the ugly panties. What had made me to travel across state lines while wearing these? I wondered. What compelled me to take such risks? Perhaps I’d done it as a joke. I imagined myself at my friend’s house, holding them out to my friend and asking her how much she’d pay me to wear them on my date. Worse than the panties, even, was the velour bodysuit I was wearing over them. In the early ’90s, velour bodysuits were not yet considered hilarious. The snap-crotch made the underwear billow in the back. If he pulled up my skirt, he would see that my ass was about to set sail.

I could feel him fumbling near my thighs. I was wearing a peasant skirt over the bodysuit, so there were many folds and crinkles for his hands to get lost in. Still, he seemed determined to push the skirt up or down, whichever way it took.

“I was just thinking,” he said with total sincerity, “how wrong I was. I think we can make this work.” He smiled and threw me back on the couch. Poor man. I knew he was just enthusiastic about the idea of getting laid, but he needed to pretend this was a relationship.

“Whoops!” I said. “Need to pee.” I hauled myself off him. Once safely locked in the bathroom, I removed the hideous underpants and re-snapped the bodysuit, which I figured could pass for both shirt and undergarment. The sensation of metal snaps nestled against my labial folds was hideous, but I would tough it out. My plan was to hide the panties somewhere in the bathroom. At some point later I would retrieve them, stuff them into my purse, throw them into a trashcan, set the trashcan on fire, then flatten the trashcan with a stolen municipal truck.

[pullquote]I began to think this was a coordinated plot to keep me from hiding my panties.[/pullquote]

But the bathroom was tiny, and there wasn’t a single place I could hide the underwear. I couldn’t believe this tall man’s bathroom could be so compact. If he sat on the toilet, his knees would go through the ceiling. He had a pedestal sink, so there was no cabinet into which I could shove the underpants. I wheeled around, which was not easy to do in the tiny bathroom. He had no wastebasket. His medicine cabinet was too shallow. His shower curtain was a single, transparent liner sheet. I began to think this was a coordinated plot to keep me from hiding my panties. Who uses a liner alone as a shower curtain?

From the other side of the door, Bill asked how I was doing. “Fine!” I called out. “I’m just trying to hide some underwear!” I didn’t say this, but it was implied. Could I stuff the panties into the toilet cistern and just never see him again?

Just as I was lifting the tank lid, a superior alternative came to me: I would toss them out the window.

After a minute or two of desperate lifting, the window still didn’t want to open. Clearly the landlord had commanded that each new tenant apply a fresh new coat of white paint in return for their security deposit. Thirty coats later, the window had been sealed shut. Like a parent lifting a telephone pole off her pinned child, I grabbed the window and harnessed a reserve of strength I never knew I had.

“What’s going on in there?” Bill called as I budged the window open a crack.

“Just need some air!” I cried, trying to shove my panties through the knife-thin gap. The underwear did not budge. Was there a screen blocking it? If there was, the underwear was stuck forever; I was too drunk to figure out how to pull it back inside. I would die of shame. Bill would come upon my corpse hanging by one hand from the window frame. I poked frantically at the underwear. More and more of it disappeared from view, until finally it escaped the window frame’s clutches, floating gracefully downward toward the apartment building’s courtyard.

It was over. My shame was out there and not in here with me. Two old men sitting on a bench in the courtyard watched my underwear gently alight on the concrete next to them. For a few paranoid moments, I imagined them looking up, identifying the apartment the underwear had come from and trotting up to the door with my panties in hand.

“What in hell?” said one. The underwear sat solemnly in the center of a courtyard, illuminated by a lone streetlamp. After a moment the other one said, “Someone threw they panties down.”

I left the bathroom and joined a sobering-up Bill on the couch. He took my hand. Uh-oh, I thought. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“That’s never a good idea,” I advised. He smiled.

“You were right,” he said. “We probably — you know. We shouldn’t. I’m just not ready.”

I couldn’t believe it. I gave him a non-aggressive kiss, a window of opportunity for him to change his mind. But he pulled away after a minute or two. “Let’s get you a cab,” he said.

As we walked through the courtyard, there were my underpants, waiting for me. I considered leaning over and picking them up, stuffing them into my purse and giving Bill a broad smile. But instead, I just stepped around them. They had saved my ass, but they’d never touch it again.

Oh, 1996: The time in which my eighth year of life on this Earth came to an end and my ninth began. I had begun to take school seriously (#honorrollgoals), spent most of my time in dance class and didn’t care about too much more than my coke bottle glasses and whatever new sneakers were coming out for the week that I could sport on casual Fridays (the perks of being a private school girl.)

The year was also a pretty fantastic time for television. I still frequently hear that television kills brain cells and that it’s an idiot box, but I have always begged to differ. Like any kind of media you consume, it can be either imbecilic or informative and, though a balance is best, there’s absolutely no reason why you cannot take any major keys from the telly. I’m still gleaning some epic lessons from television and fondly remember the messages I received from the good old year of 1996. Here are a few from some of the legendary (well, in my mind at least) series that debuted that year:

Lesson #1: Feelings are strange, but they’re some of the best parts of being a human.

How many shows have there been about aliens? I don’t have enough digits to count them all. Humans have been fascinated with extraterrestrials since we figured out that we were just one of many planets in the universe. We very clearly have no idea what these space-residing beings think of us, where they currently live, nor their ways of life, but 3rd Rock From the Sun attempted to showcase the humor of just how preposterous humankind looks from their perspective. There is undoubtedly nothing as strange and (at times) confusing as feelings: the kind that start coursing through every fiber of your being at nine years old and only continue to escalate for the next decade and beyond. The series taught me that emotion is peculiar and often doesn’t make a bit of sense (3rd Rock’s pentad struggle with the overwhelming onslaught of emotion they experience on Earth compared with their stoic existence on their own planet), but it’s one of the best parts of humankind. Though bad sensations can seem to suffocate you in their grasp — like the nasty divorce my parents had gone through not long before — emotions like excitement, enjoyment and affection have the power to imbue a kind of happiness into your life that erases all of that, even just temporarily.

Lesson #2: Superpowers seem really cool, but there aren’t really any shortcuts to making good things happen for you in your life.

Confession: I’m still very obsessed with witches. There’s just something about the connection to nature, sisterhood and that everlasting struggle between good and evil that moves me. Though I had seen countless films about the conjurers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch made it all very real and mundane for me — she was just a girl trying to get through high school, shake off the haters, like a cute boy (and have him like her back) and navigate her wacky but loving family. Sounds very much like my life then…and now. Sabrina got in the habit of trying to right her wrongs and speed up the living process by using magic, but with almost every spell she found that there are disastrous results when you try to shortcut your way through existence — sometimes immediately and sometimes when it came back to bite her months later. Though getting to the good stuff is a long journey and dwelling on your mistakes seems to last a lifetime, there are no bypasses or timesavers when it comes to what’s meant for you. You just have to keep your head down and do the work.

Lesson #3: Having siblings doesn’t make you a better or more considerate person.

I went through bouts of wanting a younger sister or brother throughout my childhood mostly because people touted it as this amazing opportunity to always have someone to play with. I was at the age where the pressure to conform is pulsing through your brain constantly, so I was feeling a serious case of FOMO about not having a sibling around. Well, that was until I saw 7th Heaven. For one, that house was busy as hell! It did seem fun to always have something going on and someone on whom you could cast the blame, but you also had no semblance of privacy, an added layer of complication and opinion and someone always in your business. Being met with the “only child” trope whenever I discussed my family gave me a bit of a complex, but it didn’t take me long to realize that that syndrome was only a cop-out for those who would grow up to be selfish and inconsiderate, no matter how many siblings they had or didn’t have. All of your interpersonal relationships shape who you are, related or not.

Lesson #4: Family will drive you nuts, but they do indeed have your back through the world’s incessant crap.

I’ll never grow tired of shows that showcase life at its realest points, from those who work in service positions to series that simply depict the inner workings of families. No, the picture isn’t always pretty, but there’s always something to take away from it all because, let’s be honest, anything comprised of people will always change and remain somewhat elusive. I’ll also never be exhausted by black families onscreen, especially those that most closely resemble my upbringing and can help me unpack what that meant then and continues to mean now. The Jamie Foxx Show injected humor into the everyday. Jamie was insufferable and sometimes delusional in his pursuits, but his aunt and uncle were always there for him and he was just as supportive in return. There’s more comfort in that than any other feeling.

Lesson #5: Cherish your BFFs with all you have, but do try to prevent them from doing stupid sh*t.

I’ve gone through a few best friends in my life — I think everyone has right? It’s not something I pride myself on or that I wish to do anymore, but people change and your relationships do as well. Almost all the shows on Nickelodeon centered on friendship, which was pretty pivotal for a girl who valued her close companions as much as I did. Few were closer than Kenan & Kel, to the point that you could hardly say one’s name without immediately uttering the other’s. They got themselves into some pretty zany situations, as you do when you’re living on burgers and orange soda. Some were simply hilarious and others gave me pause and made me wonder why Kenan (the markedly more reasonable one) would let Kel do such wild and crazy things. We cannot control our friends — they’re people who need to live and learn as we do — but we can do our duty and warn them about harm. (Though I limit my warnings to two.) It’s something I still do today in my personal life, and hopefully my favorite girls and guys love me for it.

Lesson #6: Move far enough away from your parents that you can dictate how often you see them.

I’m not sure what the average age most people move out on their own is, but I moved out when I was 25. When I was a kid, I thought I’d be married by 23…so clearly reality didn’t live up to my initial expectations. Even from a young age, I knew there was something special about striking out on your own. I figured I’d stay in NYC (it’s truly one of the best, and I’ve been everywhere), but wasn’t certain I’d move into the actual city — the boroughs still hold my heart. I am blessed to not have an overbearing parent who breathes down my neck at every turn or is unsupportive or cynical in the face of my ambitions like Raymond Barone. I thank every single God and the entirety of the universe for that daily. Nevertheless, Everybody Loves Raymond taught me that distance does indeed make the heart grow fonder, so I learned to put a sizable amount of space between my mother and I despite all her goodness. Now, I’m just a 40-minute Lyft ride away.

Lesson #7: No matter what, always be a Patty Mayonnaise.

As a journalist, the number of fictive heroines I’ve drawn inspiration from in my life is vast and constantly growing. One who I always come back around to is that of the inimitable Patty Mayonaise from Doug. I mean, how many girls are you going to find who are smart, spunky, good at sports, have great hair, an amazing wardrobe and leave boys quivering in their wake? I still resolve to channel my inner Patty and keep her outward-facing as much as I can. I’m also still in search of a Doug Funnie, but that’s another discussion for another day.

Lesson #8: It’s ok to be superficial…for, like, 30 minutes a day.

Clueless is iconic. I watched the film as often as I could and thanked both the sartorial and television gods when it was turned into a show. It was an escape from reality for me: Homework was clearly not a focus, nor were sports, dancing or extracurriculars. Well, unless you count shopping and rolling with the homies as real activities. I became quite focused on my path in school early on, thus Cher and Dionne’s quests let me detach and just have fun for a second. Yes, books are fun, but clothes and boys are equally as enjoyable. It’s okay to indulge and keep things on the surface just a little bit each day. Pretty things make me smile and, though they’re not the only things in the world, they’re definitely worth noticing.

Lesson #9: Women have the best senses of humor.

I’m still quite in awe of Tracey Ullman. She’s a sketch comedian, super cool, has aged in a way that’s unfair, has impossibly great skin and hair (you’re seeing a pattern here), is super smart and can literally make you fall out of your seat with laughter. We won’t even get into her music career, her co-writing of a knitting book, her being the second richest British actress or her other myriad accomplishments. And though my HBO watching was limited as a child — it got kind of crazy depending on the time of night — my mom did let me watch Tracey Takes On. And, naturally, I sat enraptured on a weekly basis. “You run like a girl” and “girls aren’t funny” are things we begin hearing as soon as we hit the playground. I still see that crap spewed now. But Tracey showed that we’re actually funny as hell. We’re dynamic, witty, absurd, entertaining and anything else we simply wished to be.

We worked Fashion Week, drove a Weinermobile, toured with RuPaul, sold chocolate chip cookies — and got more than we bargained for. These were just a few of the “first jobs” our storytellers shared during our April 24 event, TueNight Live. The evening was a benefit for Higher Heights, a phenomenal organization that works to get more Black women into political life — as candidates and participants. Thanks to generous donations from ticket buyers, those who donated at the event and a matching gift from philanthropist Ruth Ann Harnisch, we raised over $6000! Thank you for that. Now, some snaps:

Kimberly Allen-Peeler, co-founder of Higher Heights, talked about the HH mission and about her job as a 15-year-old Girl Scout spending a week in a congressional office… during Tailhook. Watch her story here.

Back from break, we listened to the incredible New York City Public Advocate, Letitia “Tish” James. Tish talked about what it means to her to be the first city-wide elected woman of color, and the difference she can make, especially for underserved communities. Watch her talk here.

She also shared her own, heartbreaking first job story about being a nursing assistant.

Everyone gets a start in the working world somewhere. So, as the Money editor at Reuters, I thought it would be interesting to use the monthly jobs report released by the U.S. Department of Labor as a springboard talk to notable people about their very first gigs. (For non-financial types, the jobs report is by far the most closely watched economic gauge of the U.S. economy’s health.)

After all, no matter how famous or powerful they have become, all of us remember the first moment of bringing home the bacon.

Here is what I’ve learned from editing three years’ worth of first job stories:

1. Many people got their start delivering newspapers

It sounds so old-timey, but the list includes MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, baseball legend Ron Darling and financial wizard Warren Buffett. However, so far no one has mentioned being chased by a dog.

“Family restaurants don’t always obey minimum-wage laws, so I think I got around a dollar a night. My mother was a terrific cook and guarded her recipes like the CIA. She was especially known for her dinner rolls, a recipe she took to her grave. Later on I found out she just used a whole lot of butter.”

3. Some had dismal first jobs

The very worst first-job story I’ve ever read about thus far is by Matthew Quick, author of The Silver Linings Playbook. He worked as a roofer during the summer in Philadelphia, often in searing heat:

“There was one particularly cruel day when a radio reporter said the city of Philadelphia had pulled all horses off the streets because of the heat-wave. Six stories closer to the sun, and with no shade in sight, we all looked over at our foreman. ‘Back to work,’ he said.”

4. Camp counselors rock

A recent New York Times article making the rounds among my peers is about the value of working as a summer camp counselor instead of getting office experience. It resonates with me because I was a camp counselor for three summers in college.

“It taught me a lot about responsibility, and how to make a fun summer for those kids. We did all sorts of things you might not think of for the visually impaired, like bowling, swimming – even forming a band. I played piano.”

5. Celebrities meet other celebrities before they are famous

Pundit Chuck Todd had to get Janet Reno “fresher milk” when he worked as a grocery bagger. Comedian Kathleen Madigan encountered Dolly Parton while working at a Holiday Inn.

But the best tale thus far:

Wink Martindale, the host of Tic Tac Dough, was the deejay at a Memphis radio station that played ‘That’s All Right Mama’ by a truck-driving singer called Elvis Presley. After the switchboard lit up, Martindale was tasked with finding the singer and bringing him to the station for an interview:

“…I called up his mother. She said that he was so nervous about his record being played, he went to a double-feature Western down at the movie theater. So she drove to the theater, walked up and down the aisles until she found him, brought him to WHBQ, and we put him on the air.

“It was his first interview ever, and the first time his record was ever played. And I just happened to be there.”

I have a picture of my younger brother when he was four days old. I’m sitting on my parents’ black and white geometric-patterned bedspread, cradling him. It’s one of my favorite photographs.

I’m the oldest, followed by my sister, 13 months later. Almost a decade passed before my parents had another baby. Bryce’s birth was momentous. He was charming from the first day, with a wide, impish grin. As time went by, my mother would say, Bryce is going to do great things: He has the brains, the work ethic, the brawn.

When Bryce was thirteen, he started drinking. In our family, drinking wasn’t just about experimentation. No one in my family drank. At fourteen, when the cops called to say he had broken into our neighbor’s house on the hunt for cash to buy booze and drugs, my mother called me at college, desperate and knowing there was a real problem. What had begun as acting out for Bryce had become a salve for anxiety and depression.

When my mother got the courage to intervene, Bryce sobered up. He graduated from college, earned an MBA, worked hard; he fell in love. He was engaged to be married. Up and up. But then his heart was broken. The demons he’d kept at bay for more than ten years began to slither back. Three years ago, at 40 years old, my baby brother ended his own life.

At first I was angry: How could he give up? Then I was scared. We have a similar genetic code, a similar upbringing. We share “nature and nurture” both, whichever supposedly matters more. But anger and fear are often masks for sorrow. Eventually, I understood that I was mostly sad. Sad that he hadn’t lived the life of promise we thought he would. Sad that his life was riddled with pain. Sad that he and I, and my sister and parents for that matter, hadn’t had better relationships.

Perhaps because I’m the oldest, I had become the emotional parent at an early age. By adulthood, I was often providing financial aid to family members. On and off for over a decade, one of my able-bodied parents and/or siblings lived with me. Needless to say, this is not how a functional family operates. Depleted and disheartened, I had disengaged. I worried that I was robbing my husband and young children of attention that was rightfully theirs; moreover, it was just too painful. For the last decade of his life, contact with Bryce was minimal. When he was desperate enough (e.g. going through a child custody battle), I would hear from him. Always wary that if I reached out, I would be asked for something, and thus feel used, I remained quiet.

The death of a loved one is one of life’s most trying experiences; a death by suicide is exponentially more complicated. Haunting. Humbling. And, fair or not, shaming. But as our family memorialized Bryce’s life, each of us grappling with our own grief and guilt and heartbreak, for me there was an unexpected surprise. Like a surgeon’s scalpel, Bryce’s death carved a deep and painful wound, but it also cleaned a pathway to healing truth. I realized that I believe – truly believe – that my brother still exists. A glove may slip off a hand, but even when the gloves are off, the hands are still there. I found myself sharing this idea again and again: Consistent with my Christian beliefs, I will see Bryce again. These hopeful feelings were accompanied by a newfound certainty that God is a tender parent who loves us.

With the comfort of this certainty came an obligation to forgive my parents for their inability to be what I wanted them to be, what I felt they should be but weren’t. There was also an opportunity to make peace with the life I have. In what I think of as the soundtrack of my adolescence, there’s a lyric from “As” by Stevie Wonder (from “Songs in the Key Of Life”) that says: You can bet your life, and that, and twice its double/That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed. My siblings and I didn’t get the perfect parents. Neither did my parents get the perfect parents. No child ever gets the parent they deserve. But, if Stevie Wonder can be believed, we get the parents we need; The right parents, who sometimes do wrong. And who am I to say that Bryce didn’t live his intended life?

It’s time to rise up, get a rise out of someone, watch the bread rise, and rise to this fabulous occasion…

Join TueNight for an evening of Gen-X storytelling around the theme RISE on Tuesday, March 6th in Manhattan. We’ll be in the cozy downstairs bar at The Wren where we’ll drink cocktails, enjoy delicious food and rise up together.

Our Storytellers:

Abby West (@AbbyWestNYC) Now a senior marketing manager at Audible, Abby is the former executive editor of Essence.com, and an Entertainment Weekly and People mag vet. A self-described “pop culture fanatic,” she’s a firm believer in the power of storytelling and will one day finish her own book.

Melanie Dione (@beauty_jackson) Melanie is a writer, and podcaster from New Orleans, currently residing in Pittsburgh, PA. She is one half of the creative duo behind The Good & Terrible Show, and can be heard weekly on the popular “Bad Advice Show.” When she is not using her gift of gab, she is making geek dreams come true as the Director of Entertainment for Universal FanCon.

Elana Rabinowitz (@ElanaRabinowitz)A writer and teacher living and working in Brooklyn, NY, Elana has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and many others.

Yng-Ru Chen(@Yngaling) Until February 2018, Yng was the Director of Marketing and Partnerships at Tattly. She has extensive experience in the arts, museums and creative industries. She now works with institutions and artists as an independent marketing and communications consultant.

Kerika Fields Nalty (@KerikaFields)Kerika Fields Nalty is a Brooklyn-based writer and photographer whose work has appeared in The Daily News, The Source, Variety, Vibe and numerous other print and online publications. The author of “He’s Gone…You’re Back! The Right Way to Get Over Mr. Wrong” also enjoys speaking and has been a panelist at Bindercon NY. She currently writes for MSXFactor.com

Whitney Johnson (@johnsonwhitney) Recognized as one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world (Thinkers50), Whitney Johnson is an expert on disruptive innovation as she describes in the critically acclaimed book “Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work” and the upcoming book “Build an “A” Team: Play To Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve.” (Harvard Business Press, 2018).

**Please buy tickets in advance — we will not sell tickets at the door**

Never seen a show? We’re grown-ass lady storytellers who host evenings on the regular with a variety of authors, each reading her personal essay around a common theme — like this:

“TueNight is a great place to share and exchange work, thoughts and ideas in an intimate and safe environment. I highly recommend it as a speaker or a listener to feel more connected to a wonderful community.” —Stacy London, What Not to Wear

“TueNight is a cathartic, fun evening with a bunch of wonderful strangers and friends. It’s pretty much the only reason I ever leave my house on a weeknight.” —Lori Leibovich, Time Inc

“TueNight readings feel like a giant hug from that one friend that *gets* you.” — Amy S Choi, Mashup Americans

]]>http://tuenight.com/2018/02/rise-tuenight-event-brooklyn/feed/0What’s the Most Ageist Thing Anyone Has Ever Said to You? (VIDEO)http://tuenight.com/2017/11/whats-the-most-ageist-thing-anyone-has-ever-said-to-you-video/
http://tuenight.com/2017/11/whats-the-most-ageist-thing-anyone-has-ever-said-to-you-video/#respondTue, 07 Nov 2017 21:30:12 +0000http://tuenight.com/?p=24483“You’re old!” “When are you going to dye your hair?” “You look great for your age!”

We asked several women over 40 to share the rudest, funniest, and just plain strange comments they’ve heard about being the age they are. Which um, isn’t old, by the way.

We filmed this at our last TueNight Live event in Manhattan, sponsored by AARP (High five AARP! We love our sponsors!) and we’re so happy to have them sponsor this video. It’s all part of their mission to reinvent what it means to age — aka #DisruptAging.

What’s the most ageist thing anyone’s ever said to you? Watch this video and then tell us YOUR most ageist story in the comments below. We’ll be rounding them up to share for collective commiseration. We’re #NobodysMaam.

He was 50. I had just turned 30. He had a big job in the city at a law firm, lived on Long Island, and wore tailored suits to work. I assumed he was rich. He sounded rich. I was working as a telephone dominatrix from my ramshackle apartment deep in Jersey City and had just filed for bankruptcy. His voice was measured, wise. I liked him more than the others and more than I was supposed to.

My voice on the phone, was confident, lulling — often just a whisper. It was one of my trademarks and how I controlled them. I was good at it. The other women on the line thought the guys would spend more money on you if you yelled at them. They were mostly wrong. One of my best clients, a shy music professor from England who had six pet rats, left me five stars and this comment on my site one time: “I’d sell my house, quit my job and crawl across glass to hear that voice.” Hyperbole? Maybe, but I liked it. I like to be good at things.

It was my full-time job to talk to men and take them on an “It’s A Small World”-like boat ride around the idea of what it would feel like to submit to a woman. They wanted to feel a woman over them, more powerful than them – but not in real life. Only in imagination, through a digital switchboard of anonymity and in voice alone. Sometimes the men wanted to be feminized and made to wear women’s clothing or forced to be with other men. Sometimes I’d ask them to crawl on their hands and knees across the floor while we talked or to lick the heels of my imaginary leather boots. I would tell them to spank themselves for being very, very bad boys – and they ate it up for breakfast. It wasn’t a perfect scenario, not being in the same room or whatever, but neither one of us ever really thought they’d do much of what I’d asked them to do anyway. That was part of it, maybe. Safer.

[pullquote]I found work that accidentally lifted me up and kind of saved my life.[/pullquote]

Then, after our little journey through their psyche, the calls would end with them screaming out some version of “Yes, Mistress. Thank you, Mistress,” or they’d just hang up on me when they were done, filled with regret, hearing the dull hum of their normal lives creeping back in at the end of their two dollar and ninety-nine cent per-minute dreams. They’d go back to living their dude lives and try to keep their perversions on lockdown. They’d forget about me — until the feelings rumbled up again. And they always did. I made an ok living.

In many ways, I was the perfect candidate for work like this — depressed, angry, “unfit for a real job” (or at least that’s what the last boss I had before I got into this work had said about me). My 20s had been spent trying to figure out how to live after my mother died from breast cancer — which she had battled in some form or fashion from the time I was ten years old. It was like some giant pause button descended on me that I was always battling to break out of. Stuck in amber and heavily medicated, it was hard to do much more than sleep 14 or 16 hours a day and ride the wild Paxil waves that beat me down many days. I often I thought I’d be better off with her, wherever she was that wasn’t here.

But I guess I deep down really wanted to find a way to keep going because I figured out a way to make enough money to live by doing work that I could do from bed, under the sheets, in the dark – night or day. I found work that accidentally lifted me up and kind of saved my life. To these anonymous men, who were seeking a woman to worship, I became a goddess. A master of hearts and minds and dicks. I was the most beautiful woman in the world when we talked, when their own minds filled in the blanks of who I was and what I would be for them. I loved it. It was a drug and a performance. “You’re dumb, and I’m special,” I’d say to them, and they loved me more for it. Before long, after nights and hours of listing out all the ways I was better than anyone else, I almost started to believe it.

This newfound confidence bubbled up right around the time that my talks with this wealthy-ish, Jewish-ish, business man started to deepen. We spoke about our fears and our disappointments. He told me about the awkward surprise birthday party his wife threw for him, his 10-year-old son in therapy. I told him about the years since my mother died, my own struggles with anxiety and how I was afraid to get a real job ever again. He told me that I had real skills, even if they weren’t clear to me just yet, but he could see them. He told me that if I could “harness the powers of the phone work and put them into a traditional work context, I’d be unstoppable.” He believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. He was like a life coach. Who bent over and did stuff to his butt when I told him to. The calls got longer, and we laughed a lot. We were pushing the limits. It felt more dangerous than any fantasy that came before it. You were never supposed to really like them, and you were never supposed to really meet them. I found myself often thinking about both.

I remember him telling me that he was committed to gaining my trust. He wanted to be worthy of me, he said. He wanted to know how he could prove it.

[pullquote]He deposited five thousand dollars into my bank account with a teller at the Washington Mutual on East 9th Street while I listened on the phone.[/pullquote]

I started to test him with little tasks for fun. It was so easy to say things, but what would he really do? How far would he go? My alarm clock broke, so I asked him to become my new one. He rang me at the same time every morning to wake me up. Nine a.m. If I wanted to continue sleeping, I’d say “snooze please,” and he’d ring me back ten minutes later. Like regular life, that sometimes went on through four or five snoozes. Sometimes he’d have to leave meetings with ten or fifteen people just to keep ringing me back.

I sent him to Times Square, so I could see him on one of those free public web cameras that people view from around the world. At the appointed time, he got right in front of the camera and a display of postcards and I LOVE NY t-shirts and kneeled. He kissed the ground while we talked on the phone. I heard the whirring of the city and the sirens, and I watched on the screen from my apartment with my mouth hung wide open. There he was. Balding. Tan. Mine, if I wanted. He bent on the street, and I swooned.

I’d been getting stronger during those days we’d spent circling around each other, and, after a few strange twists and turns of fate, I suddenly got an amazing opportunity to move to Portland, Oregon to study advertising at arguably one of the best ad agencies in the world (“Just Do It,” you know the one). When I told him I wasn’t sure if I could go, I just didn’t have the money to move, he said that wasn’t an option and that he wanted to give me the money. I had to go. He was right. He deposited five thousand dollars into my bank account with a teller at the Washington Mutual on East 9th Street while I listened on the phone. That was the first day he learned my real name. As he filled out the deposit slip, I revealed it, letter by letter like a polaroid developing right in front of him. I had to trust him; there was no other choice. L. U. I. S. S. A. C. H. E. K. O. W. S. K. Y. He sounded it out. He laughed and put his money on me.

How was that not enough? I’m not sure, but it wasn’t. Money was easy. I needed more.

I’m not sure where the idea came from, but it came fast and clear and then I asked him, sweetly, “Will you please, pretty please, get my name on you forever.”

He agreed instantly. This was the gauntlet, and he wanted what was on the other side: me.

The day it happened, I was in Portland, alone in an office conference room with floor to ceiling glass walls, talking to him, out loud, on one of those speakerphones that look like a spaceship — and he was in NY. He called me at the beginning of the tattoo session, and I heard the very first moment the woman cut my name into his skin. The buzz of the fluorescent office lights sung over my head as the sound of the tattoo drill cranking filled the room, along with his small moans and sighs, trying to eat his pain. I held my breath and bit my lip. I cried, hard, but didn’t let him know. Was this love? It felt like love. I heard the tattoo artist ask him, “You haven’t ever met her, have you?” as the needle went in deep. Neither of us knew how she knew. Maybe it really was that obvious to everyone but us. When it was over, he sent me a photo of it. There it was. What I wanted. I gasped quietly as I sat at my desk, pretending everything was the same.

When he got my name tattooed on his hip, we were still just voices on the phone. We hadn’t met yet – and then we did. Two months later in San Francisco. He was on a business trip, and it was my 31st birthday. There was lots to celebrate. The first moment we were together, he kneeled at my feet. After that, we met again, a few months later back in New York. He put me up at the W and wore a dog collar to dinner. On that trip, he told me he loved me. Then we met once more in LA – where we ate at the Ivy on Robertson and he predicted that this LA sparkle would one day not be so special, that it would just be my normal life (and then one day much later, like magic, it was).

That year in Portland blew by quickly, and when we weren’t meeting up in cities coast to coast, we were talking morning and night and imagining how it would go when we were in the same place, at the same time. It was all still just a fantasy but getting more real by the minute.

The day I flew back home to New York to return for good, he was waiting for me in the airport, smiling so big with two dozen roses in hand and a limo waiting for me – a real one, black and stretch, the kind that you might have taken to senior prom. I flinched, the car was loud and ridiculous, but it was a grand gesture like no one before him had ever made. I imagined that maybe this was just what real love for me would look like – dangerous, embarrassing, messy, wild, imbalanced.

I got into the car with an open heart, unsure of what would come next, but trusting deeply that he would love me, worship me, and maybe even heal me, and knowing that he was trusting me to lead him to good places and to punish him for all the crimes and failures of his life – real and imagined. As I saw the skyline come back into focus, I hoped that maybe that would be enough.

For a long time, I couldn’t relate to mother-daughter relationship drama stories. I was way too preoccupied with an operatic level of paternal drama for that. My father’s attentions, and the absence thereof, consumed my childhood. I was too busy being adored, smacked, screamed at, and gaslighted by my dad to have any emotional space left to hate my mom.

My own daughter, Amira, was born 11 days after my 30th birthday. Four and a half years later, my son Lev was born. I did the stay-at-home-mom thing for 10 years, throughout my 30s. My job performance was fair.

In the “pro” column: I think I gave my kids pretty good advice about how to stand down bullies. “If someone teases you,” I said, “squint real hard, look totally grossed out and say: ‘Ewww…! What’s that green stuff coming out of your nose?!?’” They both say it never came to that, but I know they knew what I was getting at: Don’t dignify shitty behavior. You’re bigger than that.

My temper, however, was at the top of the “cons” column. Yelling was like breathing in my childhood home; it was the way my father chose to be heard and it trickled down to the rest of us. I carried my own lack of patience and hair-trigger temper into my nrriage and motherhood. My decibel level was often jacked up to 11.ife

In the same way that I was more profoundly hurt by my father’s abuses than my younger brother was, Amira suffered more from my anger issues than Lev—and I think this manifested in certain behaviors. She didn’t exactly hate school, but she did everything she could to avoid it. My bright and deep daughter, a gifted photographer who started reading Harry Potter novels in kindergarten, who was skilled at observing others while making herself invisible, had long struggled to care about conventional education.

[pullquote]“Pass the salt.” And with those three words, the light began to peek back into our relationship.[/pullquote]

Enabled by her huge public schools, she would check out for long periods without us knowing. We would think she was doing fine, until one of her teachers or a guidance counselor sent us a note saying Amira was failing, or skipping class, or coming unprepared. It was exhausting and infuriating. And junior year of high school, her “most important” year before college, was her worst. Late one night, not long after our last disciplinary meeting with school, I found her watching TV when I knew her homework wasn’t done. I pressed her. I nagged at her. She had two protective mechanisms: one was to shut me out, and the other was to fight me off, hard.

“DO YOU WANT TO GET INTO COLLEGE??” I finally snapped.

“Fuck you,” she spit back.

Without thinking, I slapped her across the face. She pushed me back.

“I HATE YOU!!!” she shrieked.

I was used to being the loud one, but now I was disarmed. Amira stormed out of my apartment around midnight and went to her father’s house, making me the loser in a shameful divorced co-parent smackdown, and she knew it. For weeks she didn’t talk to me at all. Not a word.

I was familiar with this kind of cold war. The first time my dad threatened to stop talking to me, I was 20. He was angry with me for refusing to testify on his behalf when my mom sued him for college tuition money. It’s unclear what he thought I could say to absolve him. The older I got, the harder he worked to manipulate my attentions. He would ice me out for a while, over some perceived slight until eventually breaking the silence to lecture me about why he was right and I was wrong.

Amira knew it would hurt to shut me out like she did. I had a choice. I could let her know that she was wrong to react like she had, that I was her mother and deserved respect. I didn’t think that was untrue. I shouldn’t have slapped her, but she had pulled the final straw.

Instead, I wrote her a letter. I said I was sorry for what had happened and my role in it. I told her how powerless I felt to help her feel happy, with me and about herself. I asked for a fresh start. I would really try to yell less, I said, and to be more patient.

I still felt justified in telling her she was wrong, too. But I resisted. I wanted my girl back more than I wanted to be right. I handed her the letter when she came home from school that day. And then I waited.

Two weeks went by. One night over dinner she looked up at me and said: “Pass the salt.” And with those three words, the light began to peek back into our relationship. I knew she was ready to give it, give us, another chance.

Dori, with her son, and her daughter, Amira

When I was 10, my father told me that his personality failures and bad habits were my problem to deal with. He cited a specific example, but I don’t recall it. He was too old to change, he said. That part I remember so clearly. He was 37. It’s funny what sticks with us when we’re young.

The summer after graduating college, I decided to shut my father out for good (for the first time, anyway). I had a life to get on with, and he would keep taunting me that I didn’t deserve any of it—if I let him. I’m lucky that everyone else in my life, most of all my mom, assured me I did.

Amira did get into college. But she didn’t stay long. A year and a half and two schools later, she was out. Her greatest achievements during that time: a yearlong photography project that led to a self-produced show and tutoring English to elementary school girls in New Orleans, weren’t even done for academic credit (she never thought to ask for it).

My botanically-named daughter, Amira Fern Rosenbush, is now working toward a horticulture career. She just moved into her own apartment, five minutes from mine, and is living with three guy roommates.

Recently, Amira dropped by my place, unannounced, to do laundry. I was home alone, eating Indian takeout and watching TV. I passed her some chana saag and asked how she liked her new job, at a landscape construction and maintenance company.

“I love the work that I’m doing, being in work clothes all day, and working with men,” she said with a smile, digging into her food. “It makes me feel so confident. Yesterday I helped unload 650 thirty-pound bags of soil. Dumped it all, and created a new level ground.”

I choose to be grateful for the lessons my father has taught me, even though I’m not sure he ever really thought of them as lessons, even though I’m sad that he’s never been able to learn from them himself. A shrink once told me she thought my dad channeled his own failed aspirations and dreams through me. Maybe in a weird way, that worked. I am my father’s daughter, but I am not my father. I want my children to be free to fail – and from that, to grow. And I want to show them that I can do that too. Quietly.

One Sunday afternoon about fifteen years ago, I wandered into a panel discussion at The Brooklyn Public Library just as Carmen Boullousa, the Mexican poet and novelist, was being asked a question.

“How do you write?” the questioner asked.

Carmen Boullousa threw her hands up in the air and slammed them down the table in front of her.

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” she burst forth, with a shout and a laugh. “You start off blinded, and you work until you begin to see.”

I was 37 or 38 at the time, with a husband and two young daughters doing whatever they were doing in our Prospect Heights brownstone a few blocks away. And for as long as I could remember, I’d been trying to connect life’s dots with a modicum of elegance and a minimum of fuss. Determined to press on, to be a trooper, to feign competence, to not give passport, ever, to a willingness to be blinded.

Carmen Boullousa was talking about writing but I sensed her advice might help me in ways that went beyond it.

I scribbled her words down in a post-it note plucked from my purse, and tucked the note in my red, weathered wallet with the broken zipper.

Where it remained.

On another Sunday afternoon a handful of years later, my husband of a decade and a half looked up from the New Yorker that lying open on his lap and told me he was no longer in love with me. Several tortured therapy sessions later, he asked for a divorce.

Despite my best efforts to avoid such a fate, I had to confess that I had no idea what I was doing. I was starting off blinded. At long last.

My husband moved out of the house soon thereafter and, late that first night, I slowly pulled a down coat on over my Ikea bath robe and took the family dog for a walk. It was raining. I’d forgotten an umbrella. The dog had diarrhea. I had no plastic bag. A street light overhead illuminated a patch of sparkly wet pavement in front of me. And for a moment I stood there, wondering what would happen if I’d just lay my soggy self down flat on that sparkly wet patch of ground. If the dog would stay close. If passersby would lean over me to inquire, or step gingerly over me.

“Get yourself to the end of each day,” my therapist advised. When I told her that felt impossible, she replied, “Then try to make it to noon. And from there, get yourself to 4 p.m.”

[pullquote]“Learn to treasure the freedom you didn’t ask for.”[/pullquote]

Months passed, and when my daughters went to camp in Vermont the next summer, I decided on impulse to welcome a French woman into my house for free for a week, courtesy of the website couchsurfing.com. Sybille was from Fontainblue, had split from her own husband a few years before mine did me, and showed up at my door with a purple wheeled bag; a round of stinky, creamy cheese; a bottle of wine; a kind face.

While I imagined happily married couples the borough over gathered together with their happily married counterparts, there Sybille and I sat side by side in my unrenovated kitchen, two strangers talking and not talking, drinking wine and eating cheese.

When she left a week later, Sybille wrapped me in a hug and then took a step back to look at me and issued me an instruction.

“Learn to treasure the freedom you didn’t ask for,” she said.

I decided to throw a dance party and asked my friends to each bring a little something to help usher me into my new life.

Leanne showed up with a canvas bag full of the makings of the evening’s signature cocktail, which she called “The Jenny D Futurama.” Allison Barlow brought a piece of pale blue seaglass, made beautiful for being so weathered. Lynne brought her happily divorced friend Ruth. Kathy Brew handed me two magic seeds she said she’d brought back from Peru. Someone else brought a loaf of fresh baked bread; another guest brought lilacs.

The music got turned out loud. At some point I hopped on the coffee table. All present put their arms up in the air, closed their eyes, boogied.

Including me.

Blinded, and working so that I could begin to see.

Dating in middle age, a long marriage behind me, held a certain freedom.

As my friend Elise has put it, “You’re a lot less inhibited when the worst thing you think can happen to you happens. You’ve already walked through the town hall naked.”

So there was the artist I met for coffee with dark teardrops tattooed under his eyes. The struggling actor a decade younger who I let kiss the soles of my feet. The jazz saxophonist who, on our first date, said my true name should be “Ondine”—“Water Spirit,” he translated–and who took my face in his hands at a midtown intersection and said, “Let yourself be loved.”

And another artist who, while ordering breakfast at a diner, sat across from me at our table, looked up at the waitress and said: “I’ll have a egg.” Who was guileless and boyish and gentle—and didn’t know who Queen Elizabeth was.

Did it matter? Who knew? Maybe it was time to stop. Maybe I’d become a wise old celibate.

And then one morning three and half years ago, after a not-unhappy three-month break away from OKCupid, the impish smile of a certain profile picture prompted me to extend a two-word greeting.

“You’re cute!” I tapped into my phone.

Two minutes later, a response.

“Thank you!” it said. “My male vanity is healthy enough that I believe I’m the only person you’ve said that to this morning!”

“You’re absolutely right,” I typed back, laughing at myself now. “Sit pretty in the knowledge that you’re the only person in the whole wide world whom I’ve told is cute—so far today.”

A few nights later, Kent and I met at a bar without a name on its front, around the corner from me on Vanderbilt Ave. I was nervous and wanted to cancel. But I didn’t.

And then I saw Kent standing there, and inexplicably curtsied.

Kent moved in with me over the summer. I love the guy. We’re happy.

A few weeks ago, I discovered a note I’d written to myself when I was in the hottest of my divorce fire nine years ago.

“You’re a mom whose daughters will soon both be grown,” I’d written, “and in a flash you’re a little girl wondering, with that primitive and familiar panic, where the solid ground beneath you is. You must do the opposite of everything you think: must allow the dirt beneath your feet to go dry and then to crumble, must allow yourself to fall, fall through the earth, dust all around, blinded.”

Blinded. There it was all along. The necessary pre-condition for working to begin to see.

And here’s the thing. Carmen Bouloussa wrote a bunch of books, and was willing before every one to not know what she was doing—to start off blinded and work until she could begin to see.

I only wish I had allowed myself that practice sooner.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It’s okay to not know what you’re doing. Indeed, that’s the starting point for all that matters.